60 Seconds With Dyn’s Jake Higgins

Incorporated in 2001, Dyn is the worldwide Internet Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) leader, powering Managed DNS, Traffic Management, Email Delivery & Email Reporting for more than four million enterprise, small business and personal users. With nearly 20 data centres around the world and industry-leading uptime for over 10 years, Dyn's commitment to customer relationships and engineering excellence shines every day. Uptime is the Bottom Line.

We got the chance to sit down and talk with Dyn's marketing manager Jake Higgins ahead of its appearance at this year's Europe's Customer Festival in September.

Total Customer: What solutions will you showcase at Europe's Customer Festival this September?

Jake Higgins: The main product we're showing at Customer Festival is our email delivery product. Not many people know this outside of the tech world, but one in five emails don't go through. That's from transactional and bulk email. Obviously that has a huge impact on your ROI and customer satisfaction rates, if you're looking at stuff like receipts or confirmation emails.

TC: What differentiates your offering from others in the online and digital marketing space?

JH: On the DNS side, in particular, we are the fastest. We've never been down in the 10 years the company has been running for. We've also got a cool origins tale of being established outside a university dorm in America. These guys wanted to access their computers back in the classroom, the stumbled across a rock-solid DNS network that grew just through donations.

Then, in about 2009, it became incorporated. We've been growing now over 70 to 80 per cent each year since then. With our email we have some of the highest-quality deliverability experts in the business along with the best reputation for email sending.

TC: What challenges do you think your clients are face in the next 1 – 2 years?

JH: More and more business is being done online. More and more customer interactions are being carried out online. In this way, people have to make sure that they've got the infrastructure – the cloud infrastructure as most of it is these days – as rock solid as possible and have the ability to scale – especially with so many new startups entering the market.

You've also got to make sure you don't stifle your own growth by not having that infrastructure in place from the start. In particular, look at ecommerce sites, they can lose so much revenue if they go down for even a short amount of time, or if their email isn't working.

TC: If you had to give a tip to your customer to help them overcome these challenges, what would it be?

JH: Ensure you have a scalable infrastructure in place. I would drive more founders, especially those in the startup community, to think about this early on. Twitter did it successfully so they don't have the growing pains that a platform of that size could have easily encountered.

TC: What opportunities are there for businesses in this industry?

JH: There's a huge amount of opportunity for such an array of different companies in different sectors. I suppose if I was going to narrow the question and think about the actual individual sectors, there's a huge opportunity for (looking at the ad tech industry) to make sure your latency is really slow. They're serving more ads and making a larger ROI.

Look at ecommerce to actually drive a huge amount of ROI for their bulk marketing email, also all their receipts and other transactional stuff.

TC: Finally, what are the three main things you're looking forward to most at Europe's Customer Festival in September?

JH: Number one on the list has to be the fact that Dyn is having a live lounge there. It's got music, some cool talks, but also a bar. I'm definitely encouraging everyone to come and check us out there. If you're unaware of who Dyn are, we like to have quite a lot of fun at these sorts of things, doing things differently, so that should be a fun and interesting part of the show.

Other than that I'm looking forward to doing a bit of networking, and I know there's going to be a good opportunity to do a lot of that – something that Terrapinn have been really helping out with.

I'm also looking forward to meeting with people at the reception drinks too as they're set to be a big part of the show.

You'll be able to meet Jake and Dyn at this year's Europe's Customer Festival so you can find out more about what they can offer you and your business.